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Day 1.

One year ago, I tried living on Bitcoin for a week. The tl;dr version: I lost 5 pounds and had to move out of my house, but I survived. Bitcoin was in the $90 to $130 range back then. Since then, Bitcoin has boomed, both in its value -- surging to $1100 in November -- and in the attention paid to it. There have been Congressional hearings about it, so much digital (and real) ink spilled on it, guidance from the IRS on how to treat it at tax time, venture capitalists pouring millions of dollars into start-ups around it, book deals given to New York Times and Wall Street Journal reporters to write about it, and a ticker awarded to it on Bloomberg terminals. There seems to be a Bitcoin conference or event every week, and I have been invited to quite a number of them to talk about what it was like living on the digital currency last year. Inevitably, people ask whether it would be easier now, thanks to Bitcoin's penetration of the mainstream. I'm finding out. Yesterday, I dumped all my credit cards and cash and went out onto the streets of San Francisco with only my Bitcoin.

Thankfully, I still have over 6 bitcoin left over from my experiment last year, as I had used Coinbase and Blockchain to store them -- not the ill-fated Mt. Gox, the Tokyo-based exchange which imploded this year having somehow lost most of its customers' holdings. The lesson from that for some is that we shouldn't centralize a decentralized currency: stuff your bitcoin in a hard drive under your mattress not with a bank that can lose it. The counterargument is that those companies are better at storing Bitcoin than you are, and have apps that make it easier to deal with. Both Blockchain and Coinbase created iPhone apps for sending and receiving Bitcoin; they were later banned because Apple doesn't like apps that allow Bitcoin money transmission, but I still have them on my phone, making life a little easier this week.

Given Bitcoin's huge rise in value, I've spent only a fraction of one since last year: tipping a Bitcoin-accepting driver, buying a burger and beer in Berlin's Bitcoin-friendly Kreuzberg neighborhood, and selling a little to John Cusack (who likes hacker-y things). I have approximately the same number of bitcoin on which to live this week as I had last year, but Bitcoin is worth four times as much as it was last year. Like many bitcoin holders, I'm living larger now: I have over $2,500 on which to live this week.

Businesses accepting Bitcoin according to CoinMap. This should be easy...

But on Monday morning, I don't feel so well-off. I needed to get to work, somehow traversing the three miles from my house in San Francisco's Mission neigborhood to the Forbes office in the Financial District. I experienced deja vu: I still couldn't use Bitcoin to pay for a taxi, the bus, or my usual ride, the BART. I did, though, have access to a bike. I had run a half-marathon the day before so I wasn't super-jazzed about putting my legs to use so soon, but at that moment it was my only option. I hadn't used the bike since it was stolen earlier this year (I got it back after tracking it to Santa Cruz). To my dismay, the front wheel was hitting the brake on every rotation. I rode it a few blocks to a bike shop on Valencia Street. A guy wearing hipster thick frame glasses and all black to protect against oil stains greeted me. "I have two questions," I said. "Can you fix this? And can I pay you for it with Bitcoin?"

He didn't balk at the Bitcoin question, just took the bike, played with the wheel and sent me on my way. It was a small enough fix that payment didn't matter, but his eyes didn't goggle at the mention of Bitcoin as they did when I went into a bike shop the year before, when a clerk looked at me like I was crazy and said "Bit what?." Still, if I had had to pay, the bike shop wasn't set up to take Bitcoin. As in normal life, living on Bitcoin does require some reliance on the kindness of strangers. I manage the three miles to work on my newly fixed bike and my weary legs.

Last year, I had to move out of my house partway through the Bit-experiment so my biggest concern this time around is whether I can pay my rent. I live with roommates, one of whom plays the role of master tenant, accepting rent from everyone and paying it to our landlord. Unlike my landlord from last year, he'd heard of Bitcoin and knew what it was. When I asked if I might pay in Bitcoin for the week, he opened a Coinbase account and I sent a week of rent along. This was much easier than last year. However, he wasn't really excited about having the Bitcoin, even when I told him it's a proper investment listed by Bloomberg now. He said that if I knew of anyone who would want Bitcoin for cash, he'd be interested in selling. He was leery of connecting his bank account to Coinbase because he saw stories about people losing thousands of dollars that way. Within the Bitcoin community, Coinbase is seen as a hugely reputable and reliable service, but to someone unfamiliar with Bitcoin, it looks like just another potentially insecure Bitcoin business. Mt. Gox was crucial to Bitcoin's growth -- being one of the only places for trade in the currency's early days -- but it has hurt the technology immensely when it comes to public perception thanks to its demise.

My roommate/landlord also knows about the IRS bitcoin guidance and is worried about the tax implications if he sits on Bitcoin, or uses it over time. I sympathize. In other words, he knows just enough about Bitcoin to be a little terrified of it, but he takes it from me out of pity.

Lunch time rolled around and I was pretty excited because CoinMap.org -- an open source map that shows places that take Bitcoin around the world -- said that Ramen Underground, a restaurant a block from my office, took Bitcoin. Reddit had gotten excited about it two months earlier. And Yelp, which recently added "Accepts Bitcoin" to its list of check boxes for business info, confirmed it.

Yelp now says whether a business takes Bitcoin, but it misled me here

So I walked over triumphant at one p.m. with plans to buy some colleagues lunch. When I got there, there was no Bitcoin sticker in the window, and a server informed me the restaurant only took Bitcoin at its Japantown location. I was disappointed, but I knew that Buyer's Best Friend, the gourmet grocer that started taking Bitcoin during my experiment last year, had a stand less than a mile away at the touristy Ferry Building on the Embarcadero. So my colleagues and I walked there. The small stand had only snack foods: chocolate bars abounded. I picked out a green tea, a jar of gourmet pickles and a bag of toasted coconut chips. But then something went wrong at check-out. The Buyer's Best Friend clerk converted my $26 bill into Bitcoin and popped up a QR code using Coinbase. I scanned and sent the .06032 worth of Bitcoin for my pathetic lunch but it didn't immediately go through. It showed up as unconfirmed on my Blockchain app and the clerk didn't get an email from Coinbase letting them know they'd been paid. I waited for 20 minutes but it still hadn't gone through. It was now past 2 p.m. They recommended I try sending the money again, but I explained that there was no way to reverse the payment on my end and I didn't want to send $26 to them twice. My colleagues and I left, with me very hungry and them grateful they could buy food with cash. When I got back to the office, I transferred some Bitcoin over to food-delivery service Foodler -- another life saver from last year, a Boston-based company that competes with Seamless, but accepts Bitcoin -- and ordered Indian food. Lunch arrived at 4 p.m. Bitcoin is much better for online transactions than in-person ones, especially when you introduce intermediaries. I couldn't help but wonder if this was a breakdown in communication between Coinbase and Blockchain's services.

The Bitcoin network finally confirmed my payment to Buyer's Best Friend after 67 minutes, after I'd already returned to my office and ordered Indian food. (The grocer's founder Adam Sah promised me a credit next time I go in). On Twitter, people suggested that there was no mining fee on the transaction, so the network made it very low priority, as the computers that do the accounting for the Bitcoin network are incentivized to process transactions they get paid for first.

Back in my office, I decide I need more immediate options for shopping, so I fire up Gyft -- a website through which you can buy gift cards for over 200 retailers. They started taking Bitcoin last year weeks after my experiment ended. There's a CVS next door to my office so I buy a $10 gift card, paying for it by scanning the QR code Gyft pops up and sending Bitcoin to the site. It's so easy that I start binging. $10 from Lyft, the community taxi service. $25 on Fandango for my entertainment needs. I call up Vinny Lingham, Gyft's CEO, a serial entrepreneur from South Africa who started Gyft in 2012.

Vinny Lingham of Gyft

“We wanted to digitize and create mobile gift cards for the future because physical ones are inefficient," says Lingham. "I was into Bitcoin before the company started taking it. I was buying it for $40 a coin. When it hit the $255 price, it just seemed like an obvious thing for us to start taking it. Gift cards on mobile is otherwise boring. Taking Bitcoin gave us a cool angle to get attention and get into the press."

Lingham says the Bitcoin community went crazy. I'm not the only one to binge. The Redwood City-based start-up had $100,000 worth of Bitcoin sales its first month of accepting it in May 2013. He says they now have monthly sales of over $1 million in Bitcoin, and that it doubled in November and December when Bitcoin's value surged.

Gyft is after all a very easy way to convert Bitcoin into usable money -- without ever actually turning it into cash and paying the 1% fee charged by exchangers like Coinbase and Bitpay. Gyft absorbs that conversion fee for consumers, and at a lower rate due to its volume. Lingham won't say exactly how many users are paying in Bitcoin, but says it's more than 10,000 but fewer than 100,000.

Lingham converts most of the Bitcoin to cash but keeps some to pay for advertising on Bitcoin sites and to pay any vendors he can. "Part of the problem with all of these companies taking Bitcoin is that they immediately want to sell it, which puts downward pressure on the price," he says, a point he elaborated on in a blog post about the downside of merchant adoption outpacing consumer adoption.

Lingham says he's not worried about Gyft becoming a Bitcoin laundering service. He says the $150 billion gift card industry is very well regulated and that Gyft does good record keeping and is fully compliant with the Department of Treasury's FinCen guidance. "We have all the limits they ask you to put in place," he says. "We take it really seriously. We monitor. But we’re like a supermarket that sells gift cards. We sell store credits, so we don’t need to be licensed in each state as a money transmitter."

I ride my bike to my Bitcoin-paid home. Given the late lunch, I'm not hungry for dinner. My boyfriend and I opt for free entertainment and watch a PBS documentary, Astrospies, about a group of astronauts who secretly trained to spy on Russia from space. I'm tired early, because like last year, there's still not a coffee shop around my office or home that takes Bitcoin. And the only coffee shop with gift cards on Gyft is Caribou which isn't in San Francisco. Tomorrow, I plan to venture out to Silicon Valley though and hunt down the one coffee shop in the area that takes Bitcoin. Unfortunately, it's 30 miles away.